Introduction

Control Center is Confluent’s web based tool for managing and monitoring Apache Kafka. Control Center 3.1 provides two key types of functionality for building and monitoring production data pipelines and streaming applications:

• Stream Monitoring You can use Control Center to monitor your data streams end to end, from producer to consumer. Use Control Center to verify that every message sent is received (and received only once), and to measure system performance end to end. Drill down to better understand cluster usage, and identify any problems.
• Kafka Connect Configuration You can also use Control Center to manage and monitor Kafka Connect: the open source toolkit for connecting external systems to Kafka. You can easily add new sources to load data from external data systems and new sinks to write data into external data systems. Additionally, you can manage, monitor, and configure connectors with Confluent Control Center.

This guide explains the concepts behind Control Center, how to install and configure Control Center, and how to use Control Center.